The Boy Bishop and the “Uncanonized Saint” St. Louis of Anjou and Peter of John Olivi as Models of Franciscan Spirituality in the Fourteenth Century

On August 19, 1297, a young man of royal heritage died in the household of the Count of Provence and King of Naples at Brignoles, a short distance from Marseille. The young man was Louis of Anjou, a Franciscan friar and Bishop of Toulouse, who had renounced his inheritance and claim to the Kingdom of Naples to pursue a religious vocation. Only twenty-three years old when he died, Louis nevertheless had long been inspired by Franciscan spirituality, and less than eight months before had realized his dream of professing vows within the Order of Friars Minor at the same time that he submitted to consecration as Bishop of Toulouse.

In March of the following year, Peter of John Olivi, a native son of Languedoc, passed from this world at Narbonne. Olivi, a Franciscan for almost forty years, had lived a full life studying at Paris; teaching at Montpellier, Santa Croce, and Narbonne; and serving his order even as he raised questions regarding its direction at the end of the thirteenth century. Olivi was about fifty years old when he died.

Active cults quickly developed at Louis’s tomb at Marseille and Olivi’s tomb at Narbonne. Louis of Anjou drew pilgrims from Provence, especially from the areas surrounding Marseille and Aix, whereas Olivi’s popularity lay primarily within Languedoc, in the region surrounding Béziers, Narbonne, and Carcassonne. Canonization proceedings began for one of these men—Louis of Anjou—in 1307, and Pope John XXII eventually canonized him in 1317. The other, Peter of John Olivi, though the object of fierce local devotion, never received official sanction, and the ecclesiastical hierarchy (as well as his own order) repeatedly condemned his writings and prosecuted his followers for heresy. Indeed, in 1318, Olivi’s remains disappeared from their tomb in the Franciscan church at Narbonne, and rumors suggested that Olivi’s bones had been exhumed and burned, the official treatment of a posthumously convicted heretic.

During the lifetimes of Louis of Anjou and Peter of John Olivi, the Franciscan Order faced increasing division within its own ranks. Following their deaths, these rifts only became more bitter and pronounced in the early fourteenth century as the papacy became more active in putting an end to the schism within the Franciscan Order. These divisions pitted Franciscans against themselves as they struggled to understand and interpret the legacy of their founder, Francis of Assisi, at a moment in the Order’s history that was substantially different from the circumstances of its origins. On one side of this split were the so-called Spiritual Franciscans, dedicated to a radically conservative interpretation of Francis’s rule. On the other side of the divide, members of the community believed in an interpretation of the rule that responded to the changing needs of the order and its position in society.² Even with a split into two main factions, however, each group was far from unified, and many shades of interpretation existed within both of them.

This paper looks at the remembered figures of Louis of Anjou and Peter of John Olivi as models of two competing ideals of Franciscan sanctity. Only a short number of years after their deaths, a kind of historical distortion occurred that magnified the differences between these two men, exaggerating their relationship to each other, and thus downplaying any sympathies they might have held mutually. Looking at Olivi and Louis of Anjou together thus provides a window onto a contested moment in Franciscan history. These two figures allow us to approach the subtleties of debate over the shape of Franciscan life and spirituality in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. At a moment of intense division within the Franciscan Order, Pope John XXII promoted Louis of Anjou as an orthodox model of Franciscan sanctity – one that privileged humility and compassion over poverty, and obedience to the Church hierarchy over obedience to the Rule – at the same time that he opposed and sought to destroy a model...